The Year Behind, The Year Ahead

I find talking about myself a bit like reading pornography: it’s fun for about two minutes; after that, it takes me to a dark place I never want to visit again! I’ve spent about a month promoting my work and I’m more than ready to return to my workshop and do whatever it is I do for a living. But allow me to make these final personal reflections before I more or less vanish into the interior darkness.

Last year was, by any measure, kind of a wild year for me. I published three – count em, three – separate novels, two in the young adult Homelandersseries, and one stand-alone for adults, The Identity Man. Some previously published short fiction was anthologized, including one piece that appeared in The Best American Noir of the Century, and new short pieces were published in City Journal, Ellery Queen Mystery Magazine and Agents of Treachery. A lot of non-fiction came out as well, including a major article on LA preacher Jesse Lee Peterson in City Journal, an essay on Beowulf in Thrillers: 100 Must Reads and shorter pieces in the Wall Street Journal, the Los Angeles Times, NRO and elsewhere. And, of course, there were the bi-weekly Klavan on the Culturesatiric videos from PJTV.

That’s a lot of stuff – much of which, I have to say, I’m extremely proud.

Of course, this flurry of action, especially the fiction, was the traffic-jam publication of years of previous work, so I’m not looking forward to anything like that this coming year. There will be the last of the Homelanders novels – The Final Hour – which is scheduled for August. Mostly though, when it comes to fiction, I’ll be in my workshop, finishing some new stuff for publication in 2012.

What I’m looking forward to: a new look and feel for Klavan on the Culture, some promising screen projects I can’t talk about yet, and the chance at least to begin working on something completely different – a long work of non-fiction I’ve been thinking about for years. Not to mention some City Journal pieces I have planned and the usual trouble-making cultural commentary here and there as it occurs.

I hope those of you who’ve been kind enough to follow along will stay with me and stay in touch. If nothing else, I expect it to be extremely interesting.

Broman, please do expound on that powerful, thought-provoking line about pornography. How many more marriages have to die because of almost unstoppable wrecking ball of pornography? False intimacy plaques society like a category 4 cancer. Would love for you to address this “evil” in the clever way you’ve address other subjects. Rock on!